On Unix, each TCP/IP connection uses a file descriptor, so you must increase the total number of descriptors available to the operating system, and also increase the maximum number of descriptors each process is allowed to use. All Unix style operating systems have a “ulimit” shell command (sh and bash) which can allow more open file descriptors to commands started in that shell, once the appropriate kernel tweak has been made. We recommend “ulimit -n 8192”. Here are our recommended kernel tweaks: